Germany and the EU

Defensive

FROM all the boasting going on in high places in Bonn, you might think that Germany's six-month stint as president of the European Union, which ends with a summit of EU leaders in Cologne on June 3rd and 4th, has been a stunning success. Officials gleefully claim that the vast agenda they faced on taking over in January has been dealt with “down to the last dot and comma”, despite such distractions as the war over Kosovo and the resignation in disgrace of the entire European Commission in March.

Familiar-sounding stuff, of course. European tradition has it that the member state doing the rotating presidential chore slaps itself heavily on the back, while its partners mutter darkly about how much better they could (and will) manage things. If the boasting sounds a bit forced this time, that is no doubt because, with economic growth slowing, unemployment rising and an election to the European Parliament looming on June 13th, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder badly needs to vaunt a foreign-policy success.

But even allowing for the government hype, the presidency has hardly been the flop claimed by the opposition Christian Democrats. It was not, for instance, a foregone conclusion that a new commission president to replace Jacques Santer—and, in Romano Prodi, a potentially effective one at that—would be found so quickly. Nor was it certain that the financial monster known as Agenda 2000, a budget-reform package, would be tamed during the German presidency.

Whether the budget deal finally agreed in March goes far enough is doubtful. Even the most upbeat of Germans regard the proposed EU farm reforms, the core of the package, as inadequate. That complicated chapter will probably have to be revised before the EU can enlarge to the east. Yet Mr Schröder, who is always at his best with his back to the wall (where it usually seems to be these days), can take some credit for negotiating a deal at all, and one in which the Germans did reduce their own demands to help get a compromise through.

Nor was it clear that, in this first half-year, the EU would be prodded into actually doing something about forging a common foreign and security policy, instead of endlessly jawing about it. Due to be decided at the Cologne summit, after the The Economist goes to press, was a merger between the EU and the Western European Union, a ten-nation defence group. While this absorption, to start probably at the end of next year, makes sense, it is still unclear how the EU's four neutral states will fit in. The other decision expected at Cologne was the appointment of an EU foreign-policy supremo with real clout, a job that, it was thought by mid-week, would probably go to Javier Solana, NATO's secretary-general.

As for other vital reforms of the EU's institutions and procedures, such as majority voting in the ministerial council, it looked unlikely that the Cologne summit would do more than map out a timetable for decisions to be taken next year. And a much-touted European “jobs pact”, by which this German government initially set such store, was turning out to be desperately vague, despite efforts of the French, in particular, to insist on some firm targets. So the Germans are leaving the Finns, the EU's next president, one or two things to do after all.